Organised by the Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York these works were selected by 35 key curators from countries across the globe including Mami Kataoka (Japan), Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania/France) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Switzerland/UK).

For Project 35, each curator was invited to select one artist’s video that they think is vital for contemporary art audiences. Presented across Gertrude Contemporary’s two gallery spaces in four specially designed video projection spaces, these video works offer a diversity of approaches to video making, reflecting varying techniques, exploring a range of ideas and reflecting an enormous breadth of socio cultural contexts.

Gertrude Contemporary’s Director, Alexie Glass-Kantor was invited to represent Australia as one of the curators of Project 35, and for this exhibition she selected Tracy Moffatt’s 2009 work Othe r. Of this work Glass-Kantor says, “Other is rich and diverse, providing a funny, robust, and critical riff on the way “the native” has been portrayed in popular cinema.” As a comment on Australia’s position within the broader global art context, Glass-Kantor’s selection mirrors the tongue-in-cheek nature of Moffatt’s collaged content as she goes on to say, “Other disrupts mild manners by resisting subjugation and not ﬂinching from complexity, often using pre-existing moving images ironically to create an unsettling yet ribald narrative of compromised parts.”

Project 35 recalls the founding initiatives of both Gertrude Contemporary and the ICI. Both institutions began over two decades ago with the intention of exhibiting pioneers across all media including the burgeoning field of video art. Gertrude Contemporary’s emphasis on risk and experimentation has seen it feature such key film and video artists throughout the years as Australians – Peter Kennedy, Lyndal Jones and Shaun Gladwell along with international artists such as Young Hae Chang – Heavy Industries, Ming Wong, Joachim Koester and Olaf Breuning. Likewise ICI’s inaugural exhibition was a seminal survey of video art featuring work by Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, and Bill Viola.

This is the Australian premiere of Project 35 and features pivotal contemporary moving image work works never before shown in Australia.